Susan Wiggs Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Complete Collection

by Susan Wiggs

  “Certainly not.”

  “You had to’ve been.” He leaned forward, towering over her, insisting on an answer. “How the hell did you learn to act like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the breeder’s best bitch at the state fair,” he snapped. “You had me believing you spoke French and—”

  “I do speak French.”

  “Something you learned at your mama’s knee in your mansion on de Koven Street?” he sneered.

  “Leave my mother out of this. She has troubles enough of her own.” She clenched her fist to keep from smacking him. “I learned French at Miss Boylan’s finishing school, if you must know.”

  “Ah. So you swindled Miss Boylan, too?”

  “No, I—” She took a deep breath. She might as well tell all. If she’d learned anything in the past few days, it was that her capacity for deception had its limits. It was an exhausting business, pretending to be something she wasn’t. “I was a lady’s maid to Miss Deborah Sinclair, who attends the school.”

  He stopped at an isolated stretch of beach south of the rail yard. Pulling a half-smoked cheroot from his pocket, he inspected it and then tossed it aside. “I’m acquainted with her father. Famously rich. Shamelessly ambitious.” He winked. “He had good taste in hired help, though.”

  Kathleen clenched her other fist. “You would never understand. You probably treat your servants like trash. Miss Deborah was good to me.” She hung her head, knowing she could never look her mistress in the eye again. She would have to find some way to return the Tiffany jewels and the Worth gown without encountering Deborah.

  “Miss Deborah didn’t want to attend the affair Sunday night, for she was unwell.” Kathleen felt even lower. A proper maid would have stayed with her mistress. But Deborah had been just as insistent as the others in convincing Kathleen to go out that night.

  “Some of the ladies made a bet,” she continued, forcing herself to go on. “Miss Phoebe believes that good breeding is a detectable quality, and that I would be caught out, even wearing this gown.” She plucked at the green silk skirt. “Miss Lucy maintains that anyone can be fooled by artifice if it’s clever enough. And so they wagered that if I could secure an invitation to the grand opening of the new opera house, Lucy’s point would be proven.” It sounded so absurd now, so frivolous. What on earth had she been thinking?

  But she knew. All her life she had yearned to be included in the charmed circle of a rich girl’s world. When the opportunity had been offered Sunday night, she had seized it with pathetic eagerness. Now she felt infinitely older than the foolish dreamer who had donned a fancy gown.

  “Congratulations, love,” Dylan said with quiet scorn. “I seem to recall inviting you to Crosby’s, didn’t I?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should be proud of yourself. I’ve no doubt that everyone in attendance Sunday night was taken in by you.” He applauded in exaggerated fashion.

  “Dylan,” she said, hating the pleading note in her voice. “I know you’re disappointed in me, but couldn’t we go on from here?”

  “Out of the question.”

  “But—”

  “Christ. I suppose there’s only one way to get rid of you.”

  She felt a small flutter of confusion. “What do you mean?”

  His fingers made a mocking exploration of her collarbone, caressing her in a way she had loved in the train car. “Next time you decide to entrap a husband,” he said in an admonishing tone, “you really should check out his credentials. If not, you risk making a serious mistake.”

  She jerked away from him. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ah, but you do. You’ve swindled a swindler.”

  The flutter of confusion buzzed a little louder in her head. “I still don’t—”

  “We’re cut from the same cloth, you and I.” He laughed again, and the sharp reek of whiskey poisoned the air. “I suppose I should make a clean breast of it. After all, there is nothing to be gained from you now.”

  Gained from her? Surely he didn’t need to profit from marrying into wealth. “But your fortune is one of the largest in the country.” A chilling thought seized her. What if he meant to use her as a broodmare, to get heirs? Unconsciously, she wrapped her arms around her midsection.

  With false patience, he took her hands away and held them in his. “Dear heart, listen carefully. I don’t often tell the truth, but I might as well now, so you’ll see why we must forget we ever met.”

  She could more easily forget her own name, she thought, twisting her hands out of his grip. The terrible, soul-shriveling hurt inside her burned unbearably. Only a short while ago, she had believed with all her heart that he loved her. Now he seemed perfectly prepared to forget her.

  “I’m listening,” she said.

  “I am as poor as you.” He thought for a moment, rubbing his cheeks. Somehow during the day he had managed to shave, and even drunk, he was more handsome and groomed than anyone had a right to look. “Poorer,” he added. “I don’t even have a family.”

  The buzzing in her head crescendoed. Nothing made sense anymore. Dylan Kennedy, poor? “What do you mean?” she asked. “Did you lose your fortune in the fire?”

  “I can’t lose what I never had.” The expression on her face seemed to amuse him no end, and he subjected her to that velvety laughter she would always associate with him. “You still don’t get it, do you? I am a fraud, too. A grifter, a confidence man, taking money from undeserving, gullible, wealthy fat cats.”

  “No,” she whispered, thinking this was some lie he’d concocted just to punish her for her deception. “Not you. You’re lying so I’ll release you from our wedding vows.”

  “Actually, this is probably the first time I’ve told you the truth.” He struck a casual pose, leaning back against a broken dock support and crossing his ankles. “I’m a bit relieved to be able to let down the pretense for a moment. The Dylan Kennedy you thought you tricked into marriage doesn’t exist. Never did. He was someone I invented. I made up his life, his background, his pedigree, his family and his fortune.” Reaching out, he gently lifted her chin to close her gaping mouth. “Judging by the way you’re gawking at me, I was damned successful. But alas, I was nothing more than a paper prince, a fiction made out of lies and wishes.”

  She reeled in shock as a living legend died. Every young lady at Miss Boylan’s had wanted him, believing him the catch of the season. He had found a welcome at every exclusive club and party in the city. The merchant princes of Chicago had bowed and scraped to him, eagerly bringing him into their circle of power and privilege.

  When she finally found her voice, she asked, “Who in the name of the short saints are you, then?”

  He turned both hands palms up. “Dylan Francis Kennedy is a legal identity for me. I liked the name so much I went to the trouble of bribing a judge. But it’s not the name I was born with. I chose it from someone else’s family tree.”

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  He smiled. “You can answer that yourself, sweetheart.”

  Her face burned with humiliation. She felt naked before him, exposed to his knowing scrutiny. He knew her deep secret yearnings, her absurd longings. She forced herself to look him straight in the eye. He knew these things because he had felt them himself. Still, she was skeptical. Why would he go to such lengths to deceive people? Did he really mean to snag a wealthy wife, as he claimed?

  No wonder he was so bitter, she thought, searching his face for a trace of humanity but finding none. Look who he’d ended up with.

  She believed him because his explanation had the ring of truth—but so had everything else he had ever told her, including the fact that he loved her.

  He had been lying. Like her, he had pretended to be something he was not. Wealthy, educated, privileged, refined. Born into a “good” family. Perhaps that was what bothered her the most and shamed her so deeply. She had a good family, yet she had gone to the party Sunday night and behaved
as if they hadn’t existed.

  Dylan smiled, his expression shaded with the slightest bit of pity as he read her thoughts. “We’re alike, you and I. Too bad we must go our separate ways, because I enjoy certain things about you.” His summer-blue gaze swept over her. “A lot.”

  Her humiliation burned hotter as she remembered all the times she had declared her love for him, all the wanton ways she had touched him and let him touch her. What a pitifully shallow creature she was, falling in love with a make-believe prince. She deserved the hurt she was feeling. She had earned it.

  Yet even her pain was impure, if such a thing could be. It was anger, not shame, that filled the burning emptiness created by his betrayal.

  Outrage gave her the strength to stand tall and proud before him rather than crumpling into a weeping mass of misery at his feet. Her mother had warned her of this while mending the green dress. “Always keep your pride. No matter what you’re feeling inside, colleen, hold your head up and look him in the eye.”

  “You,” she said, and her voice trembled with a righteous anger. “You low-bellied, opportunistic cheater.” She didn’t yell, but something in her tone wiped the smile off his face. “We are nothing alike. I will deny it to the last of my days.”

  “Come now,” he said. “I always thought I knew my way about a confidence game, but you had even me fooled—”

  “I am guilty of only one deception, for which I have the deepest regret,” she snapped. “I acted on the spur of the moment. It was a lark, something the ladies at finishing school dreamed up. You seem to have made a career of this.”

  “Indeed I have, and you should consider doing the same, darling. You’re awfully good.”

  She took a step back, wishing he looked like the devil he was. “How can you live with yourself year after year? What is the appeal of cheating people so remorselessly as you did the night we mar—Sunday night?”

  He took a step closer, backing her against the timbers of the old, broken fishing dock so that she had nowhere to retreat. She felt the warmth of his body, and in spite of her indignation, she remembered the sensation of being held in his arms, remembered how it had made her feel as if she had finally found what she’d been seeking all her life.

  “In that one night,” he pointed out in a low, intimate whisper, “you lived higher and better than you ever did in a whole lifetime of being hardworking and law-abiding.”

  He had more lines than a traveling snake oil salesman, she thought. And sweet Mary help her, she had believed every single one. Her throat filled with words she could not speak. Pressing her lips together and praying she would show no emotion, she shook her head.

  “That’s no denial,” he taunted. “I can see it in your face, sweet Kathleen. Yes, I like that name better than Kate. I can look in your eyes and see that you loved what happened to you when you were with me. You can’t stop thinking about it, can you?”

  “Not with you bullying me about like this,” she managed to say. “Get out of my way.”

  “Why? So you can run away from me?”

  “I think you’re the one who feels compelled to run,” she said with sudden insight.

  That brought on one of his mesmerizing smiles. “Ah, you’re quick, Kathleen, a gifted learner. But I’ve already seen evidence of that.”

  “Tell me why,” she said, suddenly needing to know the answer. “Why do you live your life like this, lying and cheating people instead of making your own way, your own living? Why must you steal a living, even an identity, from someone else?”

  “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Others are out to cheat you. I learned that at a very early age. So I just want to be the shrewdest cheater in a world of cheaters.”

  She laughed harshly. “How honorable of you. Fleecing innocent people is such a high calling.”

  “Ah, Kathleen, you’ve not been paying attention. I don’t fleece the innocent. Those who fall victim to my games always have hearts filled with greed and larceny. Take yourself, for example. If you had kept your place, I never would have given you a second glance.”

  “It’s such a comfort to know that.”

  “I don’t care if you’re comfortable or not. I’m just telling you, you can’t swindle an honest man—or woman. You’re the perfect example of that. My only regret is that you turned out to be a worthless mark.”

  Though offended, she conceded his point. “Can we stop quarreling about this? It does no good at all to accuse each other. We must decide what to do from here.”

  “Don’t you get it? I’ve already decided. I’m hopping the next freighter out of town. In a few hours, you’ll be no more than a big disappointment interspersed with some extremely pleasant memories.”

  No. Her mind screamed the word, though she made no sound. When she managed to gain command of herself, she said, “You are probably quite experienced at turning your back on your troubles. Walking out on them.”

  He laughed gently. “Oh, Kathleen. If you only knew.”

  “Well, you can’t do that this time.”

  He grabbed her shoulders. Before she could say another word, he kissed her, so long and hard and suggestively that for a moment she forgot they were standing beneath a dock jutting out over the lake. For a moment she knew only the deep sweetness of intimacy, the sharp ache of yearning. He possessed some sort of dark magic that pushed aside her anger and resentment and made her shamelessly hungry for him. Then she remembered herself and pulled away.

  Why can’t you be real? she wanted to yell at him. Instead she said, “You can’t simply walk away.”

  “Watch me.” He relinquished his hold on her shoulders, turned on his heel and headed back toward the rail yard.

  Hating herself, and hating him almost as much as she loved him, Kathleen followed. “We are married,” she stated. “We haven’t a penny between us, and I’ve a family to worry about.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “You should be. As of Sunday night, they are your family, too.”

  He took a swift breath, and she suspected she had found his one vulnerable spot. Family.

  Pressing her advantage, she said, “You are simply going to have to become an honest man, earn an honest wage and leave your wastrel ways behind.”

  He stopped in his tracks, then doubled over with guffaws that rang across the rail yard, mingling with the hiss of steam engines and the grind of steel wheels on the tracks. For a few moments, he could not speak or breathe. After a while his mirth subsided to the occasional chuckle. “Has hell frozen over?” He pressed his brows into an exaggerated scowl. “Funny, I don’t feel a change in temperature.”

  “You can’t joke this problem out of existence. You married me.” To keep from weeping, she clung to indignation. “Or have you chosen to forget the way you went down on one knee, begged for my hand, swore it was the only way you could die happy?”

  “Well, we didn’t die, and happiness never lasts. You and I are proof of that. But it was a hell of a night, wasn’t it?” He lifted one eyebrow and flicked out his tongue in blatant suggestion. “The day after was even better.”

  “And now you have responsibilities—”

  “Tell me,” he asked, pacing in an imitation of a lawyer in court, “did you really think you were the first?”

  Her jaw dropped.

  He tipped back his head and laughed.

  Kathleen felt all the blood in her body drain to her feet. Her pallor must have disturbed even him, for he reached out a hand to steady her. “Actually, you needn’t worry about Sunday night’s charade. That’s all it was. The courthouse burned. I have no idea where the marriage certificate went. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s burned to ash, no doubt. So there’s no record whatsoever of our little escapade.”

  No record, she thought, except his image, forever branded on her heart.

  He seemed to have sobered up considerably as he found a jagged path back to the terminal. “As charming as you are, I really must be going,”
he said.

  “We spoke vows before a priest,” she reminded him.

  “Which would probably move me deeply, were I a Catholic.”

  Ah. Yet another lie. She didn’t even bother being surprised. “You are,” she said simply. “You knew all the responses as only a Catholic can. You’re just saying that in hopes of invalidating the marriage.”

  “There was no marriage,” he snapped. “Just a bit of cheap theatrics to comfort a dying man.” He let go of her arm. “So that,” he concluded, “is that. Have a nice life, Kathleen O’Leary.” Whistling, he turned his back and swaggered away.

  At a loss, she stared after him, wondering what in heaven’s name to do next. Weep? Wail? Scream? Scold? Or join him in laughter and self-mockery?

  Before she could make up her mind, someone called out, “Dylan Kennedy! Stay where you are!”

  She and Dylan both turned at once to find a tall, heavy man wearing a well-cut suit and a crooked handlebar mustache, stiff with wax. In one hand he held a bullwhip. In the other, a Colt’s five-shooter, aimed straight at Dylan’s heart.

  TWELVE

  Dylan let a friendly, guileless smile slide across his face even though all the whiskey he’d swallowed suddenly wanted to lurch back out into the open. He closed the distance between himself and Vincent Costello with a manly stride, politely ignoring the loaded gun.

  “Well, Vince. Fancy finding you here,” he said, making certain he stood between Kathleen and the gun. Shit, he thought. Of all the rotten luck. He could sense Kathleen behind him, breathing in and out like a beached trout, still angry and hurt by the way he had left her. What the devil did she expect, that he would simply concede she was right and go straight? Become a dairy farmer or coal man, for Christ’s sake?

  Costello glared at Dylan’s outstretched hand. “Stay where you are,” he ordered.

  Kathleen’s breathing accelerated. Maybe, thought Dylan, she had been telling the truth, that she’d never been in the game and Sunday night was her first. He wanted to tell her not to be scared, he’d handled Costello before.